Once upon a time, liberalism used to be a movement about creative thinking, problem solving, vision, imagination, free will, and rational thought.

It was against anti-intellectualism that was stuck in its ways. It was against abuse, negligence, blaming the victim, ruggedly individualist deregulation, conforming to norms, practical normalcy, simple-mindedness, closed-mindedness, anti-elitism, folk community, and common sense.

Then, something changed.

One day, liberalism encountered a different kind of conservative. It encountered heritage, narrative, story, custom, culture, and tradition. It encountered a conservatism that believed in reliable rules of engagement, discourse ethics, due diligence, duty of care, due process, and procedural justice.

In sum, it encountered a conservatism that believed in grace before law.

I guess the thing that baffles me the most about liberalism are the matters of inductive reasoning, evidence, and even anti-dualist fatalism.

Those were excuses taken a long time ago not only to justify racism and sexism, but pragmatic nationalism as well. The point was to deny who people were on the inside that counts, but rather to simply judge them for what they are on the outside. It was to deny people's individual agency to behave as they will, but rather to believe that people's personalities could be generalized from their physical existences...

...yet here liberalism is, accepting those ideas. The point is to oppose personal responsibility while abusing people, and expect those who are abused to conform to those who abuse them and deny personal responsibility...

...which is just like the conservative notion of power politics and opposing civil rights.

Modern liberalism has been subverted indeed. Maybe they should just call it "neoconservatism".